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7.12-beta-1 Released


Jason Carr

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Loving the different themes for different platforms. Should it remember the games view of the new theme?

Meaning I use vertical wheel 2 in city hunter and 1 classic mini. But when I switch back and forth it keeps the view I was on instead of switching back to the specific one for each theme. 

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@kmoney The game menu view currently always uses the default theme, which isn't ideal, I know. I may or may not get back to that before the official release. The tricky thing there is that there are probably several different things users are going to want, whether it be the same theme as the games list you came from, a specific theme for all game menu screens, or the default. Someone will probably ask for all three at some point, which certainly complicates matters, so I just haven't tackled it yet.

@GunerX In all honesty, that is almost certainly unrelated to LaunchBox or Big Box.

@Charco Well that's puzzling. I'm tempted to say it's some kind of temporary OS issue or something of that nature; have you tried rebooting? I'm doubtful that any changes we've made to the 7.12 betas would be causing any issues like that.

@angelobodetti Currently it just uses the previous view that was used when switching themes. Specific views from previous themes are not remembered. I imagined that most people would pick their theme and their view per platform and stick with it; we'll see if we get any more requests for that. :)

@wallmachine We might have to just call that one a fluke for now, since it's likely going to be rather difficult to troubleshoot.

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bigbox bug some background images render just black but it does render when you go to view images fullscreen, i opened the image in photoshop and saved it back as a jpg again and now its working problem is there are many images like this that just render black as backgrounds.

example https://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/games/details/78276 add this game and you will see the snake background image will be black and the other one will show fine.

i don't remember this happening before 

 

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@emko I ran a test on that image and I can confirm that it's not loading properly with .NET's WPF JPEG decoding utility, which is pretty odd. I'm not sure how to fix it without coding my own JPEG decoder (that'd be a nightmare). We're using a more performant method of loading images now, which is probably why this is a new issue since 7.11. All I can figure is that that particular image uses some kind of strange codec format; that stinks but I'm not sure what to really do about it. If we figured out exactly what the problem is, we might be able to batch convert problematic images on the games database, though. How many images have you found?

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4 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

@emko I ran a test on that image and I can confirm that it's not loading properly with .NET's WPF JPEG decoding utility, which is pretty odd. I'm not sure how to fix it without coding my own JPEG decoder (that'd be a nightmare). We're using a more performant method of loading images now, which is probably why this is a new issue since 7.11. All I can figure is that that particular image uses some kind of strange codec format; that stinks but I'm not sure what to really do about it. If we figured out exactly what the problem is, we might be able to batch convert problematic images on the games database, though. How many images have you found?

ohh so old method is still used for full screen image viewer and thats why it still works there? there are many i was noticing black backgrounds hard to find them when your looking since many games have multiple background images

 

EDIT: NEVER MIND THIS IS DIFFERENT BUG 

for these platforms it seems to load a random fanart background which is good but randomly it won't load any image, i was monitoring the file access and when i get these black backgrounds Bigbox is not loading anything

9106dfbb6e0e768e20d993b1f60633c9.jpg

0818ad846026d23494a77a3ae23df4e1.jpg

1fe44a6601a25e487ab3037c16d95330.jpg

 

 

Edited by emko
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@emko Background images not loading on the platform screen can actually be caused by several different things; for performance reasons, Big Box will just give up if it goes through 5 or so random games and doesn't find a background image for any of them. That logic has been in place for a long time though. I guess my only point is that the background images when viewing a specific game is a better test for that scenario.

@damageinc86 It's difficult to get the timing exactly perfect; obviously the goal is to show Big Box immediately after the video ends, with no delay, and without the video getting cut off. That is happening on some systems but I guess on others a split second of the video might get cut off. You're the first person to even notice that that's an issue lol. I'll see if there's anything I can do to improve it, but it's a difficult thing to get exactly right on every possible system.

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Just now, Jason Carr said:

@neil9000 I'm actually still working on putting out another new beta today, which is why I haven't mentioned it yet lol. Been working on more RAM reductions and performance improvements.

Ah OK. I was just curious as I was prompted a couple of hours ago to download it, but you hadn't posted here about it. Cool, performance improvements are always welcome, i'll grab the next one in the morning. :) 

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Alright, beta 12 is now out as well. As I stated earlier, I've been working primarily on performance and reducing RAM usage. I did find a memory leak that I think was introduced in 7.11 that should be fixed now as well. I'm now loading even more things in background threads to prevent stuttering in the interface.

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@ckp Yes it should, or at least that's what I'm hoping. Please test and let me know if you can.

@damageinc86 That's quite strange. Are you using any file sync services or anything that could delete or change files in the LaunchBox folder? Big Box uses a file located at LaunchBox\Metadata\videoActive to determine if the video is still playing, so if something happens to be interfering with that file, that could be causing the issue. Other than that, I'm lost. I suppose it could also possibly be an issue with a particular video file. Yeah, I'd go ahead and restart the computer to see if that makes a difference, as well as confirming 100% the LaunchBox version number (which should be at least 7.12-beta-12).

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Beta 13 is out now as well guys. Believe it or not, we had a different memory leak that only occurs when a sound card is just randomly ripped from the computer (or disabled, etc.). That doesn't sound like much of an issue, but it is on arcade cabinets where TVs are commonly turned off while the computer is running, and since sound often goes through the TV's HDMI port, the sound card is essentially disabled when the TV gets turned off lol. Learn something new every day. ;)

I've also made some more minor RAM and performance improvements in this beta. I've been doing extensive testing on an 8-year-old machine with a Core 2 Quad CPU in order to eliminate as many issues as possible. We're pretty smooth at this point, even when run for days at a time on crappy hardware.

Depending on how everything goes for you guys with this beta, I'm hoping to put out the official release tomorrow.

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On 10/24/2017 at 3:51 PM, Jason Carr said:

@emko Background images not loading on the platform screen can actually be caused by several different things; for performance reasons, Big Box will just give up if it goes through 5 or so random games and doesn't find a background image for any of them. That logic has been in place for a long time though. I guess my only point is that the background images when viewing a specific game is a better test for that scenario.

why not just show random images from the Fanart - Background folder for that platform instead of looking for random games with fanart? for playlist i can see that could be a issue but why not check what platforms the games belong to and randomly go between their Fanart - Background images?

 

anyways i just picked the fanart images for my playlists and platforms so its good now but i did like random game fanarts 

Edited by emko
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2 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

Believe it or not, we had a different memory leak that only occurs when a sound card is just randomly ripped from the computer (or disabled, etc.). That doesn't sound like much of an issue, but it is on arcade cabinets where TVs are commonly turned off while the computer is running, and since sound often goes through the TV's HDMI port, the sound card is essentially disabled when the TV gets turned off lol.

Oh good! That sounds like my situation. I put my HTPC to sleep. Sound goes through my HDMI cable to the TV. Then later the htpc woke up (TV is off) and was running for a day without my knowing it was awake. I turned on the TV and saw it was powered up with virtual memory errors.

So, tonight I'll upgrade to the latest Beta and leave BB running with the TV off to see if it's fixed.

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